The mayor’s race: Steinbrueck’s talking dogs, McGinn taking shots

The 2013 Seattle mayor’s race is being fought in the dog days of summer, and candidate Peter Steinbrueck has come up with the feature of talking dogs on his website.

It may be a bow-wow of a campaign pitch. Still, candidates are desperate to somehow attract attention for an Aug. 6 primary election. Coming at a time of year when we usually tune out politics, the primary is expected to attract only 35 percent of the Emerald City’s voters.

Peter Steinbrueck’s talking dogs: A bow-wow of a gimmick, or an attention getter?

Mayor Mike McGinn is doing the rounds of Seattle police precincts, and on Wednesday unveiled a new cable TV ad depicting himself as a champion of libraries. State Sen. Ed Murray is up with a TV spot stressing his gayness — Murray is shown with former Massachusetts Rep. Barney Frank — but also his ability to get things done in Olympia.

Still, McGinn’s public image is at the heart of the campaign — especially to an electorate that has twice recently bounced incumbents in the primary, Paul Schell in 2001 and Greg Nickels in 2009.

Will this year’s incumbent be seen as “lead-with-his-chin” McGinn, the pugnacious, politically isolated mayor who tried to stop the deep bore tunnel project replacing the Alaskan Way Viaduct? Or the man who resisted a police reform settlement with the Justice Department, and then resisted the City Council’s choice of a monitor, and then confronted and tried to exclude City Attorney Pete Holmes from the reform process?

“The last thing we need to do is maintain the current contentious attitude,” said Councilman (and mayoral dropout) Tim Burgess in endorsing Murray.

Or is it the McGinn who pushed a $231 million Families and Education Levy? The champion of a successful program to boost school attendance? The mayor who presided over a South Lake Union plan that transferred 25,000 acres of rural development rights into the city?

Gene Duvernoy, a master coalition builder with the environmental group Forterra (formerly the Cascade Land Conservancy), was a sponsor and low-profile presence at a McGinn fundraiser on Tuesday night. Forterra doesn’t endorse, but Duvernoy feels McGinn has grown and deserves a shot at a second term.

“The mayor and I did not see eye to eye four years ago,” said Duvernoy. “I think he has (since) learned to be mayor. He has learned how to get from ‘no’ to ‘yes.’ He has learned to work with a variety of parties.”

Voters in these parts have long memories and are unforgiving toward an officeholder who gets off to a rough start.

Washington’s last Republican governor, John Spellman, never recovered from the “Waffleman” image created by Seattle P-I cartoonist Dave Horsey. The 2001 downfall of Paul Schell began two years earlier with the World Trade Organization riots. Nickels was the victim of poor response to a snowstorm nine months before the 2009 primary.

McGinn challengers are about the bad beginning. “Our current mayor has failed and has fractured the city,” claims Councilman Bruce Harrell’s TV spot. Murray hits the succession of conflicts in McGinn’s handling of Seattle police reform. “There was a chance to avoid that early on,” he said recently.

Ex-Councilman Steinbrueck is the back-to-the-future candidate, championing neighborhoods and opposing the proposed Sodo arena, and always evoking family legacy: His father, Victor Steinbrueck (along with city voters), saved the Pike Place Market from redevelopment a generation ago.

McGinn has hit the good news trail with daily news conferences and a stress on his green credentials. “We can show people a higher quality of life goes with a bike lane or two, and lots of (public transport) trains,” he said at Tuesday’s fundraiser. He decries coal trains and exports to China, saying, “It will all come back to us as carbon pollution.”

However, the mayor has also chosen a pair of targets. He debunks Murray’s claims to be a coalition builder and conciliator by pointing to the contentious, dysfunctional, just-ended session of the Legislature. And, of course, there is that old-order symbol, the editorial page of The Seattle Times.

The Times has repeatedly spanked McGinn and is now a McGinn whipping boy. “He has changed the game in this city and that is why The Seattle Times, and people who believe it, feel that the issue is his leadership style,” Alan Durning of the Sightline Institute told supporters on Tuesday. A moment later, McGinn was sticking out his chin, challenging the audience to do volunteer work and become “a Seattle Times canceler.”

One sign of a politician’s skill is with whom he or she picks a fight.

McGinn may have chosen well. After all, the Times endorsed Governor Rob McKenna, Attorney General Reagan Dunn, Mayor Joe Mallahan, King County Executive Susan Hutchison, Governor Dino Rossi (2004 and 2008), U.S. Sen. Mike McGavick and U.S. Rep. John (“the rape thing”) Koster.